Academic painters in the 19th century aimed for a non-painterly technique and strict pictorial realism. However, their subjects were rarely realistic; instead, they were restricted to history, mythology, religion, and genre subjects like this one. Genre paintings usually focused, not on the everyday lives of bourgeois Europeans, but on more colorful, exotic lives like those of gypsies (Roma), Arabs, or Orientals. The young girl in this photograph is most likely a well-cared-for, middle class child, but has been costumed in ethnic apparel and given the typically gypsy accompaniments of a tambourine and small dog likely to perform tricks for tips....

Inscribed on Medallion, "A.L. Barye, Sculpteur, Membre, de L'institut, 1796-1875." Typed on a card that was inside the black leather case, "To commemorate the greatest "animalist" of modern times-perhaps of all time-Patey designed this medal. Barye's firm face is on one side, the famous Lion Crushing the Serpent on the other, accompanied by the tools of a sculptor and the palm, which indicates that Barye before he died was elected a Member of the French Institute." The famous Barye bronze on the reverse side shows the signature and date, "BARYE 1832".

Inscribed "Dedie a mon ami Barye, Hardy Sc." Sculptured ivory. This is the original from which was copied the likeness of Barye by A. Patey on the latter's bronze medallion of Barye, which is also in the Norton collection. Ivory size 4" x 2 3/4". Black wood frame size 6 5/8" x 5 3/8".

The 16th president of the U.S., Abraham Lincoln (1809 1865) was elected as sectional tensions in the country peaked. When Confederate forces fired on Ft. Sumter, he called for 75,000 volunteers for the Union army and the Civil War began. Four years later, following his election to a second term and the defeat of the Confederacy, the president was focused on a flexible and generous reconciliation of the states; he declared in his Second Inaugural Address, with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us...

Adah has a German bisque head with auburn hair and brown eyes. She is wearing a
pink faille silk afternoon dress with three large tiers over a hoop skirt. In
1856, dressmakers introduced a device using circles of watch spring steel
protected by rubber riveted to vertical tapes, creating "hoop skirts" without
the petticoat material and thereby greater fullness with less weight; by the
late 1850s, skirts might be six feet across and measure as much as ten yards
around the hem, even more in the case of lightweight materials that could be
pleated at the waist. But these skirts could also swing like a bell (and...

Certain mysteries about its origins surround this painting. There are indications that this portrait was done in Richmond, Virginia in September of 1861 when Johnston came to the capital to meet with Jefferson Davis. Though Kentucky-born, Johnston had was appointed to West Point from Louisiana and later rose to fame serving as secretary of war in the Republic of Texas and as a colonel in the Mexican War. As the second ranking general in the Confederate army, Johnston's fame was particularly bright in 1861, and Welch might have chosen his portrait as a "calling card" to induce the other generals...

Alejandro has a German bisque head and kid body. He wears a wig of yak hair
in the cadogan arrangement; this was a wig with a club arrangement of the back
hair, a style particularly popular among a group of English fops or dandies of
the 1770s known as the Macaronies. It was this group that was commemorated in
the satirical lyrics of Yankee Doodle Dandy, in the lines "Stuck a feather in
his hat and called it macaroni" implying an American rube come to town and
pretending to be a "dandy" or fop. He also wears a solitaire, the thin...